The image and/or sound capture and reproduction capacities of mobile phones are reduced compared with those of dedicated equipment. However, they are constantly progressing. The same is true for other portable equipment such as organizers or digital cameras. Improvements of the image and/or sound capture and reproduction capacities has made this equipment a preferred interface for distributing multimedia data. Indeed, the above-mentioned portable equipment offers many functions formerly reserved for fixed personal computers. The reduced dimensions of portable equipment as well as their limited data storage and reproduction capacities are compensated for by their capacity to make communication links to various central distribution stations. Central distribution stations are equipped with servers intended to store, classify, sort, and possibly process the data, before distributing or redistributing it to portable equipment. Exchanges between portable equipment and personal computers are also possible according to comparable schemes.
In the following description, equipment such as telephones or the other devices mentioned above is designated as the “local equipment”. Equipment intended to store data, and with which the local equipment may make communication links is designated as the “central station”. A central station can be a computer or a server, for example.
The making available to users of an increasing amount of data through the communication possibilities of local equipment, causes difficulties of location, selection and access to the data that has to be distributed to the users. U.S. Pat. No. 6,707,581; U.S. Pat. No. 6,674,923, U.S. Pat. No. 2002/0140988, U.S. Pat. No. 6,408,301; U.S. 2004/0085455; U.S. Pat. No. 5,574,519; WO 99/32960; WO 00/75914 illustrate various aspects of image distribution, distributing data linked to images, and selecting data that has to be distributed.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,707,581, for example, describes local equipment capable of reading a uniform resource locator URL and receiving data via the Internet. U.S. Pat. No. 6,674,923 while not referring to local portable equipment, indicates the possibility of linking addresses or codes to the images of a photographic index sheet for retrieving the corresponding image data.